The uninhabitable earth : a story of the future / David Wallace-Wells.

  • Wallace-Wells, David
Date:
2019
  • Books

About this work

Description

"The signs of climate change are unmistakable even today, but the real transformations have hardly begun. For a generation, we've been taught that warming was a problem of arctic melting and sea levels rising, but in fact it promises to be all-enveloping, driving dramatic changes at every level of our lives, from everyday matters like the supply of chocolate and coffee (likely to dry up) to public health (tens of millions likely to die from pollution) to climate migration (hundreds of millions fleeing unlivable, overheated homelands). We've been taught that warming would be slow-but, barring very dramatic action, each of these impacts is likely to arrive within the length of a new home mortgage signed this year. What will it be like to live on a planet pummeled in these ways? What will it do to our politics, our economy, our culture and sense of history? What will it mean for our collective appetite for climate action? And what explains the fact we have done so little to stop it? These are not abstract scientific questions but immediate and pressing human dramas, dilemmas and nightmares. In The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells undertakes a new kind of storytelling and a new kind of social science to explore the era of human history on which we have just embarked." -- Provided by publisher.

Publication/Creation

[London] : Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2019.

Physical description

310 pages ; 24 cm

Notes

"First published in the United States of America by Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishers Group"--Title page verso.

Bibliographic information

Includes bibliographical references ( pages 234 - 299) and index.

Contents

I. Cascades -- II. Elements of chaos. Heat death ; Hunger ; Drowning ; Wildfire ; Disasters no longer natural ; Freshwater drain ; Dying oceans ; Unbreathable air ; Plagues of warming ; Economic collapse ; Climate conflict ; "Systems" -- III. The climate kaleidoscope. Storytelling ; Crisis capitalism ; The church of technology ; Politics of consumption ; History after progress ; Ethics at the end of the world -- IV. The anthropic principle.

Languages

Where to find it

  • LocationStatus
    History of Medicine
    AKM /WAL
    Open shelves

Permanent link

Identifiers

ISBN

  • 9780241355213
  • 0241355214